John Paul "Jack" Dunphy (August 22, 1914 – April 26, 1992)[1]
was an American novelist and playwright, and partner of American author
Truman Capote.

Dunphy was born in
Atlantic City, New Jersey,[2]
and was raised in a working-class neighborhood of
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His sister was Gloria Dunphy. He trained
in ballet under Catherine Littlefield, danced at the
1939 New York World's Fair, and toured with the
George Balanchine company in
South America in 1941.[2]

He married another Philadelphia dancer,
Joan McCracken. They later appeared in the original
Broadway production of
Oklahoma! in 1943, in which McCracken played Sylvie and Dunphy
danced as one of the cowboys. Dunphy also danced in The Prodigal Son,
a ballet performed on Broadway in conjunction with
The Pirates of Penzance in 1942.

Dunphy enlisted in the
U.S. Army in January 1944 during
World War II. During his service, he published his first work, "The
Life of a Carrot," in Short Story magazine.

When he met Capote in 1948, Dunphy had written a well-received novel,
John Fury, and was just getting over a painful divorce from
McCracken.[3]
In 1950 the two writers settled in
Taormina,
Sicily,
in a house where the author
D. H. Lawrence had once lived. Ten years older than Capote, Dunphy was
in many ways Capote’s opposite, as solitary as Capote was exuberantly
social. Though they drifted more and more apart in the later years, the
couple stayed together until Capote's death.

When Capote died in 1984, his will named Dunphy as the chief
beneficiary. Eight years later, Dunphy died of
cancer
in New York, at age 77. Dunphy and Capote had separate houses in
Sagaponack, New York. Following their deaths some of the money from
their estates was donated to
The Nature Conservancy, which used it to acquire nearby Crooked Pond
on the Long Island Greenbelt between
Sag Harbor, New York and
Bridgehampton, New York and their mingled ashes were scattered by the
pond where a marker commemorates them. Joanna Carson, the third wife of
Johnny Carson, has maintained that she also has some of Capote's ashes
(a claim Dunphy denied) which she had kept at her
Bel Air, Los Angeles home in the house where Capote died. After the
ashes in California were stolen and returned, she bought a crypt for
Capote's ashes at
Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in
Brentwood, California; although it is unclear if the ashes were ever
deposited there.[4][5][6]

Capote dedicated his short story "One Christmas" to Jack's sister
Gloria Dunphy.

Dunphy was portrayed in the film
Capote (2005) by
Bruce Greenwood and in the film
Infamous (2006) by
John Benjamin Hickey.